But the film was all optical illusion. And then, when no one was looking, it shifted into syntactico-semantic illusion.

When characters appeared on screen, the network graphs of their complete internal representations of knowledge were overlaid along with them, and with the current state of the ego momentarily foregrounded, enlarged and rotated in 3-D space, so it could be examined separate from the rest of the knowledge structure.1

At first, the theatergoers gasped or gaped in awe at the virtuoso revelation of the human soul in a computational framework that could be read unparsed as pure pattern, and they nearly choked on their popcorn.

But then the spell woven by constantly refreshed on-screen text boxes and network diagrams was broken by someone screaming out, "Yeah, but what if it's got a recursive cosmic spell check error beginning at the lowest level of meaning?!"

And so the people unable to answer this question to their own satisfaction came streaming out of the theater disappointed and angered, kicking over wire mesh garbage cans and slamming down lit cigarettes.

On top of that, they'd missed the exciting climax of the film where the group's accepted scheme of life is overlaid on their legitimating symbolic universes as the only way of navigating the endlessly auto-catalyzing accretion of primitive cosmic wave functions of indeterminate or zero substance since before time.

But by walking out on the film early, they accidentally caught a glimpse of the mirrors that reflected the bogus universe shifting suddenly surprised back into their factory-default positions.

The construction of reality had been caught off guard. It thought it had more time before the people came out and so it was merely taking this opportunity to perform some routine maintenance and install a few simple upgrades.

Fortunately, though, no one connected this glitch in reality to the obvious and only conclusion that the universe does not exist, or, at least not as we think it does and that, at a certain distance off the planet, it's all just fuckin' mirrors.

But then, what about what is ON the fucking surface?

Oh wait. They'd just been shown what THAT was too. They'd just been shown diagrammatically how words are spoken and how the ego responds, constantly shifting weights constantly updating evaluations, occasionally updating or adding a goal, or reinforcing the link between a specific neurotransmitter and a specific face.

And how what goes on in the final reality of representation has ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING TO DO WITH whatever words the characters speak and whatever these characters think these words mean at the time and place they're spoken, and EVERYTHING TO DO WITH what the pulsating little representation of ego NEEDS in order to strengthen its pulsating little arrow of GOAL to some utterly abstract absurd distant and not even pulsating OBJECT.

And how what unknown unrepresentable is ultimately being kept that way by all these layers of transducing bullshit.

Notes

1. ...which could also, for foregrounding purposes, sort by hardwired categories like life history, goals, and collection of faces -- though of course there were multiple links from them to the current ego -- the variance of whose strengths were represented in the graph by the continuous variance of the human visible light spectrum from just above infrared to just below ultraviolet or by the continuous unidirectional variation of the gray scale from just above black to just below white.

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